Flashback: Canada had the Underground Railroad…but also slavery

“Let it be taught,” said our feisty tour guide, Dorothy Wright-Wallace. “Canada had slavery – a lot of people don’t know that. But we outlawed it sooner than the United States and then offered sanctuary to freedom-seekers escaping slavery south of the border.”

Like many Canadians, I take pride in knowing that the Underground Railroad led tens of thousands of Black freedom-seekers to relative safety in Canada, mostly in southwestern Ontario where we spent three hours with Dorothy at the Black Mecca Museum in Chatham.

But that pride must be balanced by facing and reconciling ourselves with the other parts of our history surrounding the Underground Railroad (which was neither under ground nor had tracks or trains). Slavery existed here until 1834 and systemic racism persists to this day.

“What we do is tell the story that we had slaves,” said Dorothy, President of the Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society and Black Mecca Museum. She was born in 1943 in Chatham and raised amid racism.

“I always lived here in the community. I never lost my identity of who I am. I never had to look, like younger people do now,” she said. “White people have to realize, we know we can go anywhere but how are we perceived once we get there?”

In September 2021, we spent three weeks touring the far reaches of southwestern Ontario – from Toronto around to Niagara, then along Lake Erie’s shores past Point Pelee as far as Amherstburg and Windsor, and curled back to Chatham, where Dorothy’s tour was the highlight. We found our route scattered with museums, historical plaques, art exhibits, murals and other sights that together told the story of how slavery fed the Underground Railroad.

But our expanding knowledge about Canada’s slavery had really begun in Ottawa with, of all things, a Rembrandt exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada. What did a 17^th-century Dutch painter have to do with Dorothy’s life experience? A lot, as it turned out.

This was not your average exhibit by a European master; instead, it set the paintings in context. Scattered throughout the exhibit were writings from Black and Indigenous historians, artists and writers.  

Rembrandt was born in 1606, the first year that Dutch slave ships transported Black Africans to North America. Over the next two centuries, they delivered 600,000 more enslaved people. Rembrandt and other Dutch citizens bought shares in those Dutch trading companies. By the 1630s, Rembrandt was the most popular portrait painter, and the wealthy Dutch people who bought his paintings earned their money in the thriving economy based on slavery and colonization.

Rembrandt also painted landscapes.

“The depiction of non-labouring enslaved Africans in a pastoral setting both erases the existence of the rightful Indigenous inhabitants and naturalizes African presence in the Americas,” wrote Joana Joachim, a Black feminist art historian. “Such images present both colonialism and slavery as ‘normal.’ Pictures of beautiful natural settings also functioned as invitations to European viewers to join the colonial project, encouraging travel and the settlement of these ‘open’ lands.”

I’ve seen dozens of art exhibits over the years, but never one that set the paintings in a social and economic context like that. I hope we see more of that.

Onward to the Niagara Peninsula, where we stopped at the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre, not expecting to find the special exhibit North is Freedom: The Legacy of the Underground Railroad.

Yuri Dojc’s poignant black and white photographs (see main photo at top of story) depicted today’s descendants of the courageous freedom-seekers who escaped American slavery via the Underground Railroad. The exhibit honoured the contributions these families have made to Canada’s growth.

About 30,000 men, women and children fled to Canada in the decades before the American Civil War (1861 to 1865) using the clandestine Underground Railroad. This secret network had “conductors” (people of all races who helped feed, clothe and hide them) and “stations” (homes, churches, places of businesses that provided safe havens along the way). Freedom-seekers crossed the border from the Maritimes to Manitoba, but most settled in southwestern Ontario.

While riding along the Niagara River Recreational Trail, we chanced upon an Ontario historical plaque about Chloe Cooley, an enslaved Black woman in the town of Queenston. Screaming and resisting violently, she was “bound, thrown in a boat and sold across the river to a new owner in the United States.” Sadly, that was probably not unusual, but what happened next certainly was.

Two sympathetic men stepped forward. William Grisley, a neighbour who witnessed Chloe’s abduction, and Peter Marin, a free Black and former soldier, hustled off to tell Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, an abolitionist who promptly took steps to abolish slavery in Upper Canada (now Ontario). Of course, some members in the House of Assembly (many of whom owned slaves) opposed Simcoe. But, they were willing to compromise.

Chloe had been sold on March 14, 1793, and on July 9 – a mere four months later – a law was passed to gradually abolish slavery in Upper Canada. No slaves already in the province were freed, but no more slaves could be brought in. Baby steps. “It was the first piece of legislation in the British Empire to limit slavery and set the stage for the great freedom movement of enslaved African Americans known as the Underground Railroad,” said the plaque.

Further along the Niagara Parkway, we came to the Brock Monument at Queenston Heights, a towering homage to Major-General Sir Isaac Brock who led the British to victory over the invading Americans in many battles of the War of 1812. Two plaques near the monument’s base honoured the “Colored Corps” of about 30 Black men commanded by white officers during the war. Having a separate Black corps set a precedent, yet this segregation continued until the First World War. 

Study a map of southwestern Ontario and you can appreciate the watery barriers faced by freedom-seekers trying to get from the United States into Canada. Lake Ontario, Lake Erie and Lake Huron are immensely formidable, as is the St. Lawrence River. Two slightly smaller rivers – the Niagara River and the Detroit River – are more plausible crossings, although still swift-flowing.

At the far southwestern end of the province, we explored the lovely town of Amherstburg, along the Detroit River’s banks, and the Amherstburg Freedom Museum.

We made the required appointment to tour the museum during Covid. Assistant Curator Lorene Bridgen-Lennie shared eye-opening information as she guided us through the three main areas, starting with the church. The Nazrey African Methodist Episcopal Church was a terminus on the Underground Railroad, offering food, shelter and education.

After slavery was finally abolished in Canada in 1834, even more freedom-seekers headed north, Lorene explained. At Amherstburg, the Detroit River narrows, has islands in the middle, the current is not as strong and the water not as deep as elsewhere, making the town a “highly trafficked area on the Underground Railroad,” she said. “But it’s not an easy journey – many Blacks were not taught to swim.”

Push and pull factors brought escapees: the pull was Canada’s free soil; one push factor, resulting in another surge of freedom-seekers, arose from the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. This American law allowed bounty hunters to search in the northern U.S. for escapees and force them back into slavery. But the bounty hunters also crossed into Canada, so Blacks who had made it here still weren’t necessarily safe. Even free Blacks were captured and had no legal recourse.

Next, we toured the Taylor cabin, with its rope bed, spinning wheel, cradle and birthing chair. George Taylor, an African American from Kentucky, escaped slavery, fought in the Civil War, and came to Canada in 1870. He lived in the simple cabin, as did his descendants until the 1970s.

Lorene left us to wander about the exhibits section. I chilled at the sight of leg irons with a heavy chain and ball attached. I paused before a list of key dates in the story of Canada’s slavery, starting in 1628 with the arrival of a six-year-old Madagascar boy, given the name Olivier Lejeune by Father Paul Lejeune who owned him. Little Olivier was the first person of African origins known to have lived in Canada. Through the 1600s and 1700s, various laws were passed to strengthen slavery, until 1793 when Chloe’s story prompted Simcoe to change the tide towards abolition.

Even after slavery ended in 1834, life didn’t suddenly turn rosy for Blacks in Canada. Racism and segregation prevailed, including segregated education. Ontario finally closed its last segregated schools in 1965, but Nova Scotia held out much longer – until 1983! I was shocked that it had lasted that long.

The Freedom Museum successfully dispels the myths around slavery, segregation and safety: Canada had slavery, Canada had segregation, and Canada wasn’t always the safe haven we like to believe.

After leaving the Freedom Museum, we drove past the nearby First Baptist Church that had also sheltered Blacks fleeing slavery. We examined murals on a high school: a Black man and woman work in a field while above them, a map of the United States shows shackles, and a ball and chain. We walked along the waterfront promenade, looking at the pretty teal-blue Detroit River flowing swiftly. Pretty but deadly. I shuddered to think of swimming across it in the dead of night.

We booked a guided tour of Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site, in the town of Dresden, but a Covid outbreak cancelled it. I was disappointed because I wanted to learn more about the famous Josiah Henson, known as “Uncle Tom” because he reportedly inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to write the 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Henson escaped slavery, settled near Dresden in 1841, established a settlement for Black people, and became a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

However, our appointment at the Black Mecca Museum led us to Dorothy, whose stories gave energy and life to all those slavery facts, and let us know that the effects of slavery – both American and Canadian – linger today.

Dorothy first took us through the exhibits, indicating items of note: a cross-stitch sampler with the spelling improving as it was completed, chains and shackles, a not-so-large box in which people hid to escape slavery, and a horrible collar with bells on it to alert people to runaway slaves.

“I don’t even know how they’d have it in their heads to invent these things,” she said.

Chatham was a mecca for Blacks because it was further from the U.S. border, so bounty hunters were less likely to capture freedom-seekers, who often arrived in the late fall and winter when the hunters didn’t want to travel.

“We were one-third of the population in Chatham around 1850,” Dorothy said. But when the Civil War broke out in 1861, many Blacks went back to the United States to fight for the North and never returned to Canada. Chatham’s Black population is now about 1 to 3 percent.

Not all Blacks who came were poor or uneducated. Those who travelled the Underground Railroad and their descendants included doctors, nurses, journalists, musicians, actors, sculptors, painters, and hockey and baseball players. Some of those profiled in the Black Mecca Museum included:

• Sophia Jones. She wanted to be a doctor but became a nurse since she couldn’t go to medical school in Canada. Eventually, she went to Michigan and became the first Black female doctor there in 1885. “She makes me feel proud. We need our heroes,” said Dorothy.
• Mary Ann Shadd Cary. The first Black woman known to have edited a North American newspaper, Cary founded the Provincial Freeman in 1853, encouraging Blacks to seek equality through education and self-reliance.
• Dr. Martin Delany. Born free in Virginia, he moved to Chatham in 1856 and practised medicine there for nine years. He helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union Army and became the army’s first Black officer in 1865. He stopped a local outbreak of cholera in its tracks. “He doesn’t get enough recognition.”
• Fergie Jenkins, born in Chatham in 1942, played baseball for the Chicago Cubs. A sculpture of the pitcher will be installed at Wrigley Field in 2022.

Dorothy showed us the Records Room, shelves filled with land deeds, Masonic records, and family history binders. “We’re trying to get these digitized. If there’s ever a fire…”

She asked us if we had time to go for a walk around town with her. Of course! So we set out down the street, stopping here and there in the working class neighbourhood as she greeted neighbours and told us about Chatham’s famous Black people. She also shared stories about her own life growing up as one of nine children. Her father died early and her mother supported the children by working as a domestic servant in well-off homes, and washing and ironing shirts and uniforms.

Dorothy walked across town to a non-segregated school where she was one of just five Black students. Teachers gave better marks to white kids. She recalled the school superintendent coming into her Grade 3 class, where she was the only Black, and looking directly at her as he told the Little Black Sambo story.

We walked past King’s Variety store, the former site of the Provincial Freeman newspaper office, where Mary Ann Shadd Cary wrote her editorials promoting temperance, social reform, and Black political discourse.

As we walked along, I imagined Dorothy was seeing a different scene than we were – the people she grew up with coming and going from the Dominion grocery store, the meat shop where she used to work, and the William Pitt Hotel where she ran the elevator and young men were bellhops. “If you were fair enough you could set the table [in the dining room], but we couldn’t have dinner there.”

Just two years ago, at a Chatham restaurant, Dorothy had dinner with a group of people that included another Black woman. They were rushed through their meal and then asked to leave. Dorothy raised the issue with the manager and owner. Eventually, the other Black woman received an apology, but Dorothy never did. “I will not go back there.”

But at Martin’s Restaurant, Blacks were treated fairly. “You knew you could go there and not have a problem.”

We wandered into Tecumseh Park, where the all-Black girls’ softball team played on Thursdays in the 1950s. There was also an all-Japanese girls’ team – Chatham had had a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War. Down a street of bigger, fancier homes, we saw where Dr. Delaney had lived. “He had to pay more [for his home] because he was Black and he received less when he sold. That’s just part of the stigma.”

We ended up back at the Black Mecca Museum, where we thanked Dorothy profusely for our three-hour tour and said our good-byes.

“What I’ve said to you today is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “A lot of this information is not part of the education curriculum. There’s a stigma. It’s like we never existed.”  

But she and other museum guides make presentations in schools whenever they’re invited.

“I won’t live to see it, but all I want is an even field,” she said. She pointed to the skin on her forearm. “Leave this outside the door.”

As we departed, I felt mixed emotions: enthusiasm for wonderful guides like Dorothy, pride in Canada having had the Underground Railroad, yet also shame for Canada’s treatment of Blacks long after slavery ended, and the systemic racism still present. Confronting stains on our history – including residential schools and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples, internment of Japanese people during the Second World War, and the Chinese head tax – is not always easy, but we can’t ignore them any longer.

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We visited southwestern Ontario in September 2021. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.